A Quiet Drive for the Holiday: Child Occupation in the Car Part II

A parent is always a teacher to her children.  As the children became older, I would take a subject that one of the older children was learning in school and write about it on a pad of paper.  This can be anything from all you know about frogs to poetry and geography.  Then beginning with the youngest, each participant wrote one fact he or she knew about the subject and passed the paper on to the next person.  Or a person could write one line of a rhyming poem and then pass it on, the only rule being that the poem had to rhyme not necessarily make sense.  At the close of the day’s driving, we would share our creation with the family.  This can become quite comical. 

Try bringing along a small tape recorder [and lots of batteries].  The first person can pose a question or record a sound and the recipient needs to answer the question or guess the sound.  A story can be created this way with someone starting the story and the next person continues the story thread.  Just like the poem, the story does not have to make sense, just continue to build.  Then listen to it at the end of the drive.  [This particular parent is also a creative writer…can you tell?]

 

We have mixed and matched these ideas over the years, and because of them, we have crisscrossed the United States and have even visited some of the northeastern provinces of Canada and made it all the way out to Newfoundland.